Swedish~ Stereo~

Saturday, September 24, 2011

When the last Melodifestivalen-2011 single has left the chart it's time to check who was the most successful commercially this year.I should say that obviously 2011 was quite terrible by sales comparing with previous years. Was it the lack of interest to chosen songs? Or was it because of just a few songs released physically and audience being ok with listening to digitally released ones on Spotify? I don't have a clue. I was sure that songs like "The Hunter", "Lucky You", "Elektirsk", "No One Else Could" even failing to qualify sounded like a huge radio-hits but they haven't even charted. My personal opinion is that Melodifestivalen has got a crisis. Old schlager-formulas wasn't working already - Sanna and Linda winning their semifinals haven't even made Top-10 spending 3-4 weeks in chart but at the same time public wasn't quite open for newcomers and when MF-2010 every semifinal had surprising winner (Salem, Anna, Timoteij, Eric), this time it was all about names already successfully established in the contest. Result? Final without intrigue and... hmmm... not outstanding sales figures.Dilba, Christian Walz and Le Kid are the only charting not qualifiers of semifinals.All finalists and Second Chance qualifiers except Shirley's Angels have charted but were separated into 2 groups - those who reached Top-10 and stayed in chart 9 weeks and more (six finalists - Eric, Danny, Swingfly, The Moniker, Sara, Nicke + Loreen) and those who weren't accepted by Top-10 and left in 4 weeks or less.Hope right now SVT is selecting songs which will get to chart without excepion and if you've missed news about Webjoker-2012 in short - channel will choose 32 songs, will separate them to 4 semifinals and every week SVT and public will be voting for their own winner of semifinal, favorites of both will go to the final (between 8 songs) that will be held around November 7th. There's no information about when the first official (non-webjokers) participants will be announced but year ago it has happened on October 7th so we don't need to wait too long. You can check Poplight's article about possible candidates, the most interesting for us is if songs of Nina Söderquist, Lili & Susie and Timoteij will be accepted and if new H.e.a.t. with Idol-2009 winner Erik Grönwall will agree to participate with Fredrik Kempe's song.